Ranking the bad dads of Wes Anderson’s career
Ahead of Asteroid City (and Father's Day), we tackle the many bad dads of Anderson's filmography
Film Features Wes Anderson
You can’t trust a dad in a Wes Anderson movie.
Sure, there are a few exceptions: Bert Fischer, played with quiet affability by Seymour Cassel in Anderson’s second film, Rushmore, is as good a father as an aspiring playwright and polymath could ever hope to have, doling out haircuts and gentle advice in equal measure for his son Max and his odd adult friend Herman. (A terrible father, natch.) But for the most part, the man who wrote (with Noah Baumbach) the line “I hate fathers, and I never wanted to be one” has stuck to his bad dad guns, across 11 films and counting. Despite the attendant whimsy and regular redemption arcs, Anderson’s filmography is filled with some of the worst fathers in all of film: Con artists, manipulators, and self-servers nearly to a pater familias.
In honor of both Father’s Day and the release of Anderson’s latest, Asteroid City—which features Max Fischer himself, Jason Schwartzman, as an apparently disaffected father toiling under the scrutiny of a hardass father-in-law played by America’s Dad, Tom Hanks—we’ve opted to catalogue several of the worst fathers in Anderson’s filmography. For organizational purposes, we’ve ranked these various faildads from merely ineffectual, to outright terrible, to actively harmful to their spawn. And with one semi-justified exception, we’re sticking with actual fathers here, not just father-figures; rest assured that Bottle Rocket’s charmingly manipulative Mr. Henry and Isle Of Dogs’ dog-murdering uncle Mayor Kobayashi both maintain honorary positions of awful found fatherhood in our hearts.
So, without further adieu: Let the bad-dad-ening commence.
15 Comments
God, I miss Gene Hackman. I know he’s retired, and I know he was pretty much a jerk, but there were damn few actors like him.
He’s a singular screen presence. I look him up from time to time, and it really saddens me to see him looking every bit his 93 years.
Hell, even I thought he was retired. Turns out he was just in New Mexico.
This is one of his absolutely best performances. He often played heavies, but he’s an incredibly charming rascal in this one.
This is Bill Murray/Rushmore erasure.
I thought Bill Murray was assumed to be Jimmy Whitman in some corporeal form…maybe wrong. bah. still. agreed. least bad for least screentime even if that WAS the case.
I love the bit in ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ where Royal says that he’s had the best time of his life with his family, followed by the narrator saying, “Immediately after making this statement, Royal realised that it was true.” It sums up the character so beautifully: the fact that he would say something like that without having to believe it at first, but being unable to deny the true depths of his feelings. He’s a monster by habit, but he does have a heart in there somewhere.
Ritchie: “You were never really dying.”Royal: “But I’m gonna live!”
The Royal Tenenbaums is my go-to Father’s Day movie. Of course I watched it again yesterday. I adore the redemption arc.
Glaring omission of Bert Fischer from Rushmore… and what about Chas Tenenbaum? THEY MUST BE RANKED!
I’d just like to throw into the mix that I think the BEST Wed Anderson Dad would have to be Seymour Cassel in Rushmore. I love his gentle voice and his being naive to what a wild ride his son is on. The scene where he gives Bill Murray a haircut and a shave is a gem.
All his films are like 1960’s home movies while on a cocktail of Xans and Oxy.
Bottle Rocket and Rushmore were pretty straight forward, but starting with The Royal Tenanbaums (among my favorite films of all time) he began his descent into a pink and orange fever dream.
You can start to see it in Rushmore a bit. Ever so slightly in Bottle Rocket (Dignan’s notebook comes to mind), which makes me think he’d have done more had there been more budget.
You don’t see anything particularly damning about Melver Anderson, at least doing a cursory internet search, though Anderson’s parents were divorced. They both died within a few years of each other in the 90s. If you’re interested in biography influencing art, I guess you could make something of his films getting increasingly controlled, examining painful emotions but keeping them at a distance, after losing both his parents. That distance is really the core of Anderson’s appeal, but maybe also the thing that turns some people off of his work. But I do think the people who criticize him for being empty miss that the meticulous remove is likely a way of dealing with big emotions rather than escaping them.